Palestinian missteps; Assad may need a mid-course correction

organization in a government seeking economic and political support from the West.

  • Israel is much less likely to make territorial and political concessions to a Palestinian government which includes Hamas – and without such concessions there will be no Palestinian state regardless of what the UN votes for. Indeed, the only short-term beneficiary of the Hamas-PA reconciliation is the Israeli Right: the Right’s argument that Israel “does not have a partner for peace” was sounding more and more hollow in the face of Fayyad’s reforms and the growing level of Israeli-Palestinian cooperation. This “no partner” argument will now sound much more compelling.

    • We should hasten to add, though, that we should wait to see how things unfold. Who knows, perhaps Fatah’s pragmatism will be more influential in the new arrangement than Hamas’s intransigence. Public opinion polls in the Palestinian territories show that if elections for parliament and the presidency were to be held today, Fatah would receive 34 percent of the vote to Hamas 15 percent. Abu Mazen would receive 17.9 percent of the vote while Hamas leader Ismail Hanniya would receive only 11.4 percent.

     

    Hamas’s 4-year rule in the Gaza Strip has been an unmitigated disaster for the people there, and when Palestinians compare the situation in Gaza to the progress made in the PA-controlled West Bank it is easy to see why Fatah is leading in the polls.

    Which brings us back to Abba Eban. He said that “History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.” Has Hamas reached the conclusion that it had exhausted all other alternatives and that it is time to behave wisely? Possible, but highly unlikely.

    Advise to the Fatah pragmatic leadership: At times, disunity is better than unity, and less is more.

    2. Assad: mid-course correction as a way out

    The Syrian military continues to slaughter anti-government protesters, and the latest count is 416 dead. Hundreds more have been injured and dozens disappeared after being abducted at night by the Syrian security forces. TV videos show an especially worrisome sign of the regime’s brutality: unarmed protesters are being shot at not by soldiers using side arms or rifles (this would be bad enough), but by machine-guns mounted on tanks. These machine guns are much more powerful – and far less discriminate – than side arms, so it is clear that Assad has decided to go all the way in suppressing the revolt.

     

    The regime’s brutality has led several opposition Web sites to charge that the Assad government is treating the Syrian people worse than the Israeli military treats the Palestinians in the occupied territories.

    Assad, though, may yet succeed, for three reasons:

    • The uprising, so far, appears limited to cities in the impoverished periphery. There were hardly any protests in Syria’s two largest cities, Damascus and Haleb. The population in these two cities is better off and more educated, and the percentage of government employees higher than in other cities. The Syrian middle class, in other words, has so far not joined the anti-regime uprising.
    • The military has not fractured, and the number of defections is small (although about 200 officers resigned their membership in the ruling Ba’ath Party). It is not clear how long soldiers will continue to shoot at and kill unarmed civilians. Assad would hope that the brutality he has shown so far would deter, and eventually end, the demonstrations. Even the military may, at some point, grow uncomfortable with killing 100-200 unarmed civilians a week.
    • Unlike the international pressure on Mubarak to resign, and the military intervention in Libya, there appears to be no eagerness on the part of the international community to do more than make speeches on the situation in Syria. France already said that no action against Syria should be taken without a Security Council resolution, and there are no plans at present to have the Council debate the issue.

    Mubarak in his hospital bed and Col. Gaddafi in his bunker may be thinking to themselves that some people have all the luck in the world.

     

    Advise to Basher al-Assad: Mid-course correction. To protect your flank, make yourself indispensable to the West: sever ties with Iran, collaborate with the Lebanese government in keeping Hezbollah under control, and make a dramatic announcement, à la Sadat, that you will sign a peace treaty with Israel. You will receive the Golan Heights back, large amounts of Western aid and investment money, and more. Bolstering Syria’s national pride and reviving its moribund economy will go a long way toward undermining the domestic opposition, while distancing yourself from Iran and Hezbollah will lessen the outside pressures on you (not that these pressures have been too onerous).

    Ben Frankel is editor of the Homeland security NewsWire